Oracle Blog

Sr. Program Manager, OpenSolaris Engineering, Sun Microsystems

Long Term

"I know that when you come here to read, you realize that you are The
Market, and that all of the investments you make are long-term. In IT,
there are no day traders." -- Tom
Yager, The two technology markets

That's how Tom ends his piece about pundits and stock prices. It's a
good one, too. Check it out.

He also has some fascinating thoughts about SPARC and Solaris -- "Sun
Microsystems isn't folding up its tent on SPARC because it doesn't
stand a chance against POWER and x86, any more than it's planting and
reading over Solaris because of the looming threat of Linux. Sun
doesn't make strategic decisions based on analysts' manipulation of
short-term stock market investors, and that's one of the reasons that I
hold the company in such high regard."

What's cool about that quote is that it recognizes that some of this
stuff is long term and it's long term by design. I remember thinking
back three and a half years ago when I joined the OpenSolaris
engineering team. This is going to take years, I thought. And it has.
And that's good. If you want something to last, it has to be done
deliberately. Planning. Team building. Licensing. Analyzing and opening
code. Figuring out and implementing new business models. Educating the
customer base. Engaging new developers. Creating development models and
governance mechanisms. Building infrastructure so a global community
can grow and collaborate. It's a lot. And more. We are doing something
on a scale that I don't think has been done before in this business. We
are teasing apart a large organization -- with hundreds of projects and
over a thousand people around the world -- into parts where development
will live outside but productization inside. Right now they are pretty
much the same. And we are doing this while building and shipping what
is arguably the company's most important product. That last bit is what
people often forget. Product has been shipping during all this.
This transition is huge and not just for the obvious technology reasons
but also for more subtle cultural and organizational reasons. The only
way it can be successful is for it to be strategic by design. And it is.